


and you will be gold and gold and gold again

by Trekkele



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Experimental Style, Gen, Stream of Consciousness, away missions gone wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-13
Updated: 2019-02-13
Packaged: 2019-10-27 17:43:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17771327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trekkele/pseuds/Trekkele
Summary: Jim throws himself into the fire for his crew, and there is nothing they can do to stop him.They can wait, huddled and silent and hoping that Apollo loves Icarus a little more this time around.





	and you will be gold and gold and gold again

**Author's Note:**

> Experimental style, sitting in my drafts for far too long.
> 
> (Title credit to @prometheusascendant on Tumblr)

It’s in another of the odd spaces, between being ambushed and dragged away and waiting and rescued. There’s a very conspicuous silence shaped like James T Kirk, and they're all trying to ignore the empty place where his good natured ramblings and frantic mental plannings should be.

 

They're all failing. 

 

But the space is filled with Chekhov's careful breathing, and Sulu’s angry pacing, and the after echoes of Jim’s feet scuffing the floor as their captures dragged him away. There is no screaming from down the hall. No moans, no shouts, no painful whimpers or steel sliding across skin. This doesn’t set any of them at ease.

They can never hear him screaming. 

 

There is, he contemplates, a statistical improbability to how many away missions have gone pear shaped for them, but that kind of thinking makes him sound like Spock, and if he has a choice in the matter he'd rather not. 

 

Sulu is still pacing back and forth, arms tight behind his back and staring at the ground. He looks like he wants to set it on fire with the intensity of his glare alone. Len doesn't blame him. 

 

Jim does that, smuggles under your skin until he’s part of you in a way you can’t figure out and can’t cut away, and the insanity of it all is that you’d never even want to. He can see Nyota eyeing Sulu with irritation, conjugating vulcan verbs in an exercise she uses to center herself. 

 

She's only irritated because she can't do anything. None of them can ever do anything, hold him back or speak before him or throw themselves in the fire because he’s Jim Kirk. 

 

He never gives them the chance.

 

Jim always steps forward as soon as the cell door opens, makes himself an obvious target, loud and incessant and poking all the bruised spaces these aliens have.  

He’s good at finding the broken spaces. For his crew he fixes them, shores them up using pieces of his own soul, but for his enemies it means he can rip them apart without laying a finger on them. Len sometimes wonders if the federation ever realizes how lucky they are, that he’s decided they are something he can fix, and not just break down and start over.

 

He thinks at least Christopher Pike does.

 

“Sit down Sulu,” he says, tired but willing to take Jim’s place until he gets thrown back at them. He’s not good at softly poking into the places the crew doesn’t want him to see, but he’s learning, following a step behind his captain, and he thinks he’s a better man because of it.

 

Sulu whirls around to face him, all gold and tattered pride and anger. “How are you so calm?” he demands, fists clenched, “How can you let him do that, aren't you supposed to be his best friend??” There's a layer of jealousy there that he can't miss, even though he’s never understood it, and he wants to reassure him that Jim Kirk's heart has carried and loved more people than any man ever should,  but that's not what this is really about. This is about diving off a needle at the edge of a world and finding out that someone was willing to catch you. 

But never being able to do the same, because every time you try they keep jumping and jumping after you and finally realizing that maybe it would be better if they never saved you at all.

 

Then they would be safe, you see.

 

“Sit down Sulu,” he says again, “and think about what you just said.” 

 

He sits, strings cut, dropping to the dirt floor near Chekhov, whose head is still cradled in his hands, dusty curls wilting under the artificial lights.

 

“He has nightmares, you know.” He says casually, and can see the moment Sulu realizes what he’s said, the fear in his eyes because Jim Kirk isn't meant to be breakable. Not like that. 

“Usually, he just wakes up, shakes it off, and carries on. Never lets them bother him.”

 

“But sometimes.” Sometimes when he's alone in sickbay, when the dates start blurring together, when he wasn't sure where he is. “Sometimes he wakes up screaming, because whatever they've done, they’re aren't doing it to him.”

 

Len looks him right in the eye, and hopes the kid understands what he's telling him. 

 

If Jim kirk ever had to watch one of his crew get dragged away, bloodied and beaten, he’d break. It was simple as that. 

\------

 

Leonard McCoy meets Jim Kirk when he's just between - drunk enough to not give informed consent - and -  not drunk enough to fly. He had spent the previous evening forming a five year plan that will, hopefully, give him visitation and partial custody and a career he doesn't hate with a burning passion. And possibly get him back in Joss’s good graces, because at some point he’d loved her, and she him, and that little girl they both still loved deserves better than whispered screaming matches at three am so that she doesn't wake up. 

 

He didn't plan for Jim Kirk. He finds out, later, that no one plans for Jim Kirk, and even if they did it's impossible and useless and it's easier just to let your paper wings burn when he smiles at you. 

 

When he smiles at you you find yourself lighting the match and never regretting a thing.

 

So maybe it’s weird that this kid has decided he’s worth his time. Maybe it’s weird that Icarus thought “wings of wax” and “sunshine” and landed in the ocean instead. But he knows this much-

 

Jim will raise his fists for any passing damsel of every gender and takes injustice as a personal affront. He drinks like a battle broken soldier and sleeps as though there are wolves beyond the door.

 

He spills Len’s bourbon soaked coffee and replaces it with his own. He builds new wings out of xenolinguistics and federations politics and his third thesis and the mug he gives him for the break room and he makes them strong enough that they couldn't burn if he tries.

 

He finds that he doesn't want to try anymore. The ocean is no deeper than the sky, after all.

 

\------

 

It’s another of the odd spaces, between Jim stumbling back in with blood on his teeth and his back and his shirt, aliens laughing as though they can break him if they try.

 

There’s an odd little smile frozen between his eyes as he scans the rest of them, whole and whole and whole, not a scratch on their dusty uniforms. 

 

And in this silent space between rescue and collapse he grins, all bloody edges and stolen grace, opening pandora's box and coaxing slow hope out with the barest of touches. 

 

They lean forward, answering grins cutting across the silence as the Captain says “ _ here’s the plan _ .”

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear how you think the style worked/didn't with the general flow of the story.


End file.
